Anthony Scaramucci thinks “full transparency” means deleting evidence
After Donald Trump announced Anthony Scaramucci as his new White House Communications Director yesterday, a funny thing happened. The media and the public began looking through Scaramucci’s Twitter account and found that he’s a pro-choice, anti-gun, social liberal who donated to Obama during the 2008 election and openly insulted Trump during the 2016 election. Today, Scaramucci launched into a rather odd form of damage control.
Predictably, Anthony Scaramucci quickly began deleting his old tweets, in the apparent hope that an oblivious Donald Trump wouldn’t find out about any of it. But that only served to make the headlines about Scaramucci’s old tweets even bigger. By this afternoon, Scaramucci was reduced to trying to explain his way out of it with a new Twitter post: “Full transparency: I’m deleting old tweets. Past views evolved & shouldn’t be a distraction. I serve POTUS agenda & that’s all that matters” (link). You see the problem here, right?
Scaramucci has every legal right to delete his tweets from before taking the White House job. Under the Presidential Records Act, he may even be allowed to delete his current tweets that he’s posted since he took the job (Donald Trump is the only one who is clear violation of that law whenever he deletes his own tweets after spelling things incorrectly). But at no point in human history has even the most craven of political operative ever claimed to have been deleting records while asserting that he was offering “full transparency.”
If this is how Anthony Scaramucci defines transparency, it raises questions about how he might behave in the instances in which he doesn’t think he’s being transparent. He already used his introductory press conference to make obvious false claims about Donald Trump’s health and physical vitality, in a manner which sounded as if he were trying to please a boss like King Jong-Un. Suffice it to say that Scaramucci’s first day and a half on the job has raised some red flags.
